Romney says climate change presents a big challenge to US

SALT LAKE CITY — Mitt Romney says one of the biggest challenges facing the country is climate change and that global solutions are needed to combat it. FILE – In this Jan. 16, 2015 file photo, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks during the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego.

WASHINGTON — Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney are scheduled to meet privately this week in Utah, raising the possibility that the two former governors will find a way to avoid competing presidential campaigns that would split the Republican establishment next year, two prominent party members said Wednesday night.WASHINGTON — President Obama’s push for a new “middle-class economics” may go nowhere in Congress, but his ambitious array of proposals to raise stagnant incomes and provide more government support for struggling working families will frame his last two years in office and help make the politics of rich and poor a central issue in the campaign to succeed him.

As he decides whether to run for president a third time, Romney has accepted an invitation to speak at Jacksonville University’s spring graduation in the key presidential battleground of Florida. Bush requested the meeting, which was planned before Romney’s announcement two weeks ago that he was considering a third run for presidency, according to an unidentified party member.

Taxes were too high, and so was spending, unless there was a war on – in which case Democrats would be appeased with domestic budget increases, a fair trade for even bigger increases in the military budget. With the economy finally on more solid ground, even leading Republicans, on Capitol Hill and on the nascent 2016 presidential campaign front, are tempering complaints about overall economic growth and refocusing on the more intractable problem of income inequality. He used his remarks to broaden a populist platform he first touched on last week that marks a sharp shift from the rhetoric of his first two campaigns. Convinced that Democrats’ obsession with income inequality has struck a legitimate nerve, establishment Republicans are working to respond in time for 2016. The seeds of a high-powered clash between Romney and Bush have spooked some allies, who worry the two could split the vote and give rise to a nominee outside the party establishment.

Similarly, Jeb Bush’s new “super PAC,” announced with the fanfare of a presidential declaration, proclaimed, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.” At a closed-door retreat last week, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, encouraged the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class. While hitting familiar Republican points criticizing the size of the federal debt, Romney at times sounded like a Democrat, calling for President Barack Obama and other leaders in Washington to act on common liberal priorities such as climate change, poverty and education. “I’m one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that,” he said of climate change, charging that federal leaders have failed to enact global agreements needed to tackle the problem. President Obama used his State of the Union address Tuesday to present a vision of a new “middle class economics.” Now that the economic crisis is behind us, he argued, America can more freely choose what kind of society to create. Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor, on Wednesday called middle-class wage stagnation “the dominant issue in our public discourse this year” and into next. “It is going to be a very difficult challenge for conservatives to make the argument that they have better solutions, because these things sound so appealing,” Lanhee J. Romney spent little time talking about poverty, the middle class or climate change in a 2012 campaign in which opponents cast him as an out-of-touch millionaire.

But in public and private conversations in recent weeks he has focused on poverty, perhaps above all, a dramatic shift for the former private-equity executive. The talks come as both men have been making a flurry of phone calls to Republican donors and officials to sound them out and gather commitments ahead of what could be a bruising primary race. Romney’s top economic adviser in 2012 and now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said of the president’s proposals for free community college tuition, paid sick leave and middle-class tax cuts financed by higher taxes on the rich. “In the end, we can’t get into a bidding war with the Democrats, but you are seeing more and more conservatives entering this policy conversation,” Mr. And that’s just what I did,'” Romney said with a chuckle. “I learned some lessons, too.” Romney had previously acknowledged that climate change is real, noting in his 2010 book that “human activity is a contributing factor.” But he questioned the extent to which man was contributing to the warming of the planet and said throughout his 2012 campaign that America shouldn’t spend significant resources combatting the problem — particularly with major polluters like China doing little. Though no one has come out and said it quite yet, the principle is powerfully clear: If our middle class is dependent for its existence on federal largesse, our economic system is broken, and our political system is corrupt.

Before the speech — tickets were sold to the public — Romney spoke to a private dinner of about 130 clients of Diversify Inc., the investment firm that sponsored the event. Many of the contributors and elected officials they are courting are hoping to stave off a collision between the two that could imperil the party’s chances in a general election. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Ways and Means chairman and perhaps the Republican Party’s leading voice on poverty issues, praised the president’s “gifted speech” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said he was glad Mr. Tyler Fagergren, a manager with the firm, said people asked Romney questions about the economy and investment but were not allowed to ask about a possible 2016 campaign.

That instinct, also deeply conservative, has its roots in James Madison’s recognition that the purpose of deliberative institutions is to slow down the passions that run wild and free in democratic life – ensuring that they don’t issue forth in a rush of hasty, ill-conceived and contentious policies. So rather than pounding on Obama for his dream of a middle class that is an artifice of government policy, establishmentarian Republicans, instead, want to show that they can offer a positive agenda for lifting up those near the economic bottom. Ryan said accord could be reached on ways to reduce poverty by expanding the earned-income tax credit to childless adults, as he and the president have proposed, and drafting a public works bill aimed at modernizing an aging infrastructure. Spicer continued. “It’s balancing a budget because right now we’re heaping debt and burden onto the next generation, and that’s not fair to them.” The problem for Republicans, though, is that a debate over wage stagnation and a shrinking middle class plays on Democratic turf, where Democrats can offer up what Mr. Now, he’s used the slogan to name and define his new Political Action Committee. “We believe passionately that the Right to Rise,” its mission statement declares – “to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success – is the central moral promise of American economic life.” Well.

On Wednesday, congressional Democrats reintroduced legislation to block companies based in the United States from shifting their headquarters elsewhere to lower their tax burden. As Peter Beinart explains at the Atlantic, the instincts and theories that define the right “don’t oppose good education, good health care and good jobs, of course. Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont, proposed an expansion of Social Security. “This plays to the Democratic sweet spot,” said James Pethokoukis, a commentator at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who writes on economic policy. “They can say, ‘Hey, we have a whole set of answers.’ ” Republicans need a serious response, Mr. But they have long opposed calling them rights, for fear that doing so would undo the limitations on government power outlined at the nation’s founding.” On the other hand, as some Republicans are quick to point out, there’s another conservative tradition that presents the problem in a much different light. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, cast it in terms of our natural right to put ourselves to the kind of use that promotes prosperity – free from arbitrary, unjust and unwise overlordship.

Bush, who in recent years has worked in the finance industry, would be vulnerable to the attacks that so damaged his own campaign against President Obama. The median weekly wage for full-time workers at the end of 2014 was $796, up from a seasonally adjusted $794 a year before, and actually below the levels in 2009, when the expansion began. Chen, the former Romney adviser, said conservative economists had focused on wage subsidies through the tax code and more aggressive worker retraining programs through public-private partnerships and apprenticeships.